Interesting research
October 25, 2010 | alternatives, research | Comments (0)Two researchers who have previously studied payday lending are studying microfinance. From the story:
The thing is, no one ever really asked poor people if business loans were the most important financial product they were missing. That’s now starting to change, thanks in part to a recent wave of academic research. As it turns out, poor people lead complicated financial lives and they need money for all sorts of things.
Thursday I was at this conference, where Dean Karlan of Yale talked about research he’s been doing with Jonathan Zinman of Dartmouth. In interviews with microfinance recipients in the Philippines, the pair discovered that some 46% of borrowers used a decent chunk of their business loan to pay down other debt and about 28% spent part of the money on a big household purchase—even though fewer than 4% of people in either category ever admitted this to their bank. (Disclosure: I was at this conference because I am now doing work for the Financial Access Initiative, which co-sponsored the event.)
This sort of finding—which quantifies what many practitioners have long suspected was the case—is having an impact on how microfinanciers go about their business. “We’re an industry built on assumptions, and we’ve gotten to a point where we have to test those,” said Carlos Danel, a co-founder of the Mexican microfinance behemoth Banco Compartamos. ”Research is showing us that we actually don’t know a lot about the customers we serve.” That’s why Compartamos is conducting a 4-year study with Karlan and other researchers to find out how customers use microfinance products, and how those products do—or don’t—change their lives.
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